You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
This episode contains explicit language.
The Killers formed in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2001.
Since then, they've released five records.
Their newest album, Wonderful Wonderful, came out in September 2017.
In this episode,
singer Brandon Flowers and drummer Ronnie Venucci break down the song Rut from that album.
But the story of this killer song began when Brandon Flowers was on tour on his own with a solo album.
My name is Brandon Flowers.
I'm the singer for The Killers.
I made a solo record in 2014.
It's called Desired Effect.
And when we were going around,
I had this idea to have a song that wasn't on the record that was like an introduction to the show.
It was based on this ascending chord progression.
And I would just talk about little pieces that I was familiar with with each city.
And it was kind of like breaking the ice with the crowd.
And so in the middle of us searching for where we were going for this Killers record,